300+ Powerful Features You Must Have in Excel

Kutools for Excel is a powerful add-in that frees you from performing time-consuming operations in Excel, such as combine sheets quickly, merge cells without losing data, paste to only visible cells, count cells by color and so on. 300+ powerful features / functions for Excel 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 or Office 365!

Adding Tabbed Interface for Office

It enables tabbed browsing, editing, and managing of Microsoft Office applications. You can open multiple documents / files in a single tabbed window, such as using the browser IE 8/9/10, Firefox, and Google Chrome. It's compatible with Office 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003 or Office 365. Demo

100+ Powerful Features for Outlook

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Restores the old look and menus of Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 or Office 365. Don’t lose time in finding commands on the new Ribbon. Easy to deploy to all computers in enterprises and organizations.

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How to copy formula without changing its cell references in Excel?

Normally Excel adjusts the cell references if you copy your formulas to another location in your worksheet. You would have to fix all cell references with a dollar sign ($) or press F4 key to toggle the relative to absolute references to prevent adjusting the cell references in formula automatically. If you have a range of formulas need to be copied, these methods will be very tedious and time-consuming. If you want to copy the formulas without changing cell references quickly and easily, try the following methods:

Copy formula without changing its cell references by Replace feature

In Excel, you can copy formula without changing its cell references with Replace function as following steps:

1. Select the formula cells you will copy, and click Home > Find & Select > Replace, or press shortcuts CTRL+H to open the Find & Select dialog box.

2. Click Replace button, in the Find what box input “=”, and in the Replace with box input “#” or any other signs that different with your formulas, and click the Replace All button. Basically, this will stop the references from being references. For example, “=A1*B1” becomes “#A1*B1”, and you can move it around without excel automatically changing its cell references in current worksheet.

3. And now all “=” in selected formulas are replaced with “#”. And a dialog box comes out and shows how many replacements have been made. Please close it. See above screenshot: And the formulas in the range will be changed to text strings. See screenshots:

4. Copy and paste the formulas to the location that you want of the current worksheet.

5. Select the both changed ranges, and then reverse the step 2. Click Home> Find & Select >Replace… or press shortcuts CTRL+H, but this time enter “#” in the Find what box, and “=” in the Replace with box, and click Replace All. Then the formulas have been copied and pasted into another location without changing the cell references. See screenshot:

Copy formula without changing its cell references by converting formula to text

Above method is to change the formula to text with replacing the = to #. Actually, Kutools for Excel provide such utilities of Convert Formula to Text and Convert Text to Formula. And you can convert formulas to text and copy them to other places, and then restore these text to formula easily.

Copy formula without changing its cell references by converting to absolute references

The formulas changes after copying as a result of relative references. Therefore, we can apply Kutools for Excel’s Convert Refers utility to change the cell references to absolute to prevent from changing after copying in Excel.

Copy formula without changing its cell references by Kutools for Excel

Is there an easier way to copy formula without changing its cell references this quickly and comfortably? In actual, Kutools for Excel can help you copy formulas without changing its cell references quickly.

2. In the first Exact Formula Copy dialog box, please click OK. And in the second Exact Formula Copy dialog box, please specify the first cell of destination range, and click the OK button. See screenshot:Tip: Copy formatting option will keep all cells formatting after pasting the range, if the option has been checked. And all selected formulas have been pasted into the specified cells without changing the cell references. See screenshot:

Ah! This reminds me of my days programming a mainframe computer, in the mid 1980s! All changes to text had to be done by "find/replace". There was no such thing as putting the cursor where you wanted, , replace text. The find/replace functions in editors are very powerful tools, if you use them properly. Thank you for the tip, which helped me solve my problem!

Great Tip. What is actually happening when you do this, is you are de-activating the formula by making it no longer a recognised formula with the 1st replace (so excel won't change it). Then after you've moved/deleted/ made your changes, the 2nd replace re-activates the formula, by making it a valid/recognised formula again. This was handy when someone had entered a basic formula for a running total, but then we had to delete an item from the total. Excel would try to update the formula and break the running total

Isn't it easier to just drag the area with the formulas to the new location? That won't change the cell references. (Mark the area with the formulas you want to move. Place the cursor on the edge of the marked area so that the symbol with four arrows (N, S, E, W) is displayed. Click and hold left mouse button and drag the area to desired location.) Good luck!